Yesterday’s Guardian had this interesting story of a young fellow’s innovation (click the image above to go to the full account):
In the decadent days when Theodore Roosevelt and British royals led African hunting expeditions, they had to rely on local trackers, patience and luck in their quest to bag “the big five”. Continue reading
There is nothing quite like waking up in the morning knowing that you are about to enjoy a beautiful hike through the incredible Periyar Tiger Reserve. Sign up for the Green Walk and experience not only this wonderful feeling but also the sights and sounds that make Periyar so special. A three-hour hike, the Green Walk takes you through some of the most amazing habitat the reserve has to offer. With Great Hornbills flying overhead and langurs calling from the trees, the Green Walk is certainly a hike to remember.
Gavi is quite different from the section of Periyar near the Thekkady gate. All guests should take advantage of Cardamom County’s outbound excursion to Gavi in order to fully appreciate the unique beauty of wild Periyar. The scenery and the animals are incredible, and this full-day trek is an experience you will cherish always.
Screen shot from my subscriber’s access to old New Yorker articles–the text is cut off at the bottom of the image but you can still savor the journalistic description in the sampling.
Lillian Ross, today among the last living chroniclers, along with A. E. Hotchner, of Hemingway in living technicolor, wrote this profile of him when he was a 50-year old superstar and she was a 24-year old who had been a New Yorker staff writer since she was 19. How’s that?
Who cares how? I care that. And thank her for it on this, his 113th birthday. She has always had a distinctively invisible presence in her writing, which makes Hemingway pop on her page. Of course he never popped. He banged. Exploded. Her profile makes a trip to your local public library worthwhile to find a 62-year old hard copy of the magazine.
Or, if the library near you is no longer, subscribe to the magazine and gain access to all content in past issues. I care that she, and Hotchner, and others, have shared small sketches not designed to titillate as gossip, but yes to amuse. As in amuse-bouche. Small tastes for those who aspire to greatness and are not embarrassed from time to time to wonder how the great think, how they feel, what they do:
Malabar gliding frogs are widely distributed in the Western Ghats of India, primarily in evergreen and semi-evergreen forests at altitudes between 500 to 1200 meters above sea level. These pictures were taken at the Aralam Wild Life Sancatury near Kannore.
Last year, Sung wrote about the bats in the bamboo stands next to Cardamom County. I’ve always been aware of their presence, but I always lacked the equipment to get a closer look, and even more prominently lacked the equipment to photograph them. This year, my arsenal remains limited, but I have one more telephoto lens than I did previously. From the restaurant’s roof on a sunny day, I’m less than 20 meters away from well-lit subjects. On a windy sunny day, the subjects are generally stirring, as mentioned by Sung – the ideal time to photograph them. 
Continue reading
The Periyar Tiger Reserve’s most popular activity, the Boating Trip around Periyar Lake, gives guests a relaxing yet incredibly rewarding view of one of the most beautiful locations on earth. The wildlife is unbelievable, the scenery is spectacular, and the opportunities for photographing these wonders are plentiful.
Guest Author: Siobhan Powers
Photo Courtesy of Milo Inman
Before my journey to India, I’d never camped. Sure, I had slept in a tent in my friend’s backyard and gone to Girl Scout camp with my Scooby Doo sleeping bag, but I was feet from indoor plumbing and a roof every time. Where’s the fun in that? When I was belatedly asked to join a few interns on the Tiger Trail overnight trip into the Periyar Tiger Reserve, I was skeptical. My summer nights are usually spent running seafood to a hungry customer or chasing a high-maintenance boy across the beaches of the Jersey shore-therefore my presence in the jungles of Asia is quite ectopic, but I am an adventurous person (sometimes to my detriment). I took the opportunity for what it was- a once-in-a-lifetime chance to snuggle up to some tigers. Continue reading
Mama and baby Nilgiri Langur
Another one of Cardamom County’s fantastic excursions into the Periyar Tiger Reserve is the Nature Hike. If you are looking for an easier hike that lasts only a few hours but still provides an opportunity to see amazing animals, especially birds, then this hike is perfect. The excursion lasts about three hours and is offered at various times between 7:00 and 10:30 AM and between 2:00 and 3:00 PM. On this walk, you will hear the soundtrack of the inner jungle, as the guide leads you through the forest filled with the calls of Nilgiri Langurs and Bonnet Macaques as well the songs of a large variety of birds.
We arrived at the boat launch at 7:00 AM and were met by our guide, Kuttappan, who was exceptional. He was extremely knowledgeable about the animals, and he knew the bird songs and calls very well. He was also very communicative, always pointing out the call of the Malabar Whistling Thrush and the Great Hornbill. I was very impressed. Continue reading
When I decided to come to Kerala this summer for my internship, I got most excited not entirely about my work, but really about seeing a tiger. I can’t even remember the last time I went to a zoo, but I know deep in my closet I have a dusty photo of me and a tamed tiger from Thailand. At this time, seeing a wild tiger was actually more of a WILD idea. Since I’m working next to the Periyar Tiger Reserve, a home to approximately 40 tigers and many other animals, I’m practically neighbors with them and awaiting a miraculous moment to see a tiger before my trip to Delhi.
As a Korean descendent, I must introduce you all to some Korean culture and explain why I’m writing a blog post that is dedicated just to tigers. I’m sure a lot of my Korean folks will agree that tigers and Koreans go way back. My relationship with tigers started when I was 3 years old when my grandmother told me a story about a tiger that smoked using bamboo pipes. My reaction was: “Really? Tigers smoke, too?”
Source & Credit: Picture of a Tiger at SamChunSa (삼천사) at BookHanSan (북한산)
The morning of the staff picnic began with a wakeup call at 4:30am to prepare for a prompt 6am departure to Munnar, a beautiful hill station in the Idukki district of Kerala. To the interns, an early morning with a long bus ride meant a great opportunity to catch up on some sleep after several long days of trekking and work. To the staff it meant the party could start even earlier.
The Men of Cardamom County
Within minutes of leaving the Cardamom County parking lot, a small group of the staff was already busy preparing the music list for the day’s journey. Immediately the bus was pouring with energy- Bollywood music incited full volume singing and raucous dancing that was only made more amusing by the jostling motions of the moving bus. It provided not only a humorous and exciting start to the day but also a somehow appropriate cultural soundtrack to the beautiful mountain views, tea plantations, and villages that passed by the bus window on the way to Munnar. Continue reading
From Scotland and South Africa to Scottsdale and South America, certain destinations draw countless visitors whose singular recreational motivation is golf. Few other sports or activities require the amount of terrain that golf does, so its environmental implications go further than most sports. But when considering golf’s land use, it is refreshing to recognize how many courses end up being preservations of rich natural areas and contribute to conservation as places of refuge for wildlife and plant life.
Our Central Reservation Team recently visited the Periyar Tiger Reserve.
We were really happy and enjoyed a lot in the Periyar Tiger Reserve. We saw a bunch of elephants and a bison very close to them. Rafting of 3 hours was very good and the chance to be in nature was appreciated. We hope to visit again the next time we’re back in Thekkady.
– Mr. Shyam, Mr. Ashley and Mr. Sumesh
We recently met Mr. Manoj, a tourist escort who is a regularly visitor at Cardamom County. He was happy to share some photographs from his most recent trip to Thekkady.
I visited Periyar Tiger Reserve along with my some of my business friends. We were really pleased to have such good sightings. We saw elephants, bisons and many birds, but the main attraction was the natural ambiance of the park which helped us to unwind. – Mr. Manoj
As I had a spare couple days on mainland Ecuador before flying to the Galápagos, I took a very brief trip to Mindo for a day and a half, where Mari Gray, a pre-kindergarten teacher at the Tomás de Berlanga school in Santa Cruz, told me I should be able to see lots of cool birds. Perhaps not too coincidentally, my host in Quito had asked me if I’d heard of Mindo just a few hours after Mari emailed me about the town, similarly informing me that the biodiversity was incredible, particularly for birding.
male Club-winged Manakin photographed by the author through binoculars
Even after taking a pretty intense ornithology class at Cornell University and working for the Lab of Ornithology, I don’t really consider myself a birder. When I went on a number of field trips for the class it was the first time I’d really used binoculars with the intent of just spotting birds, and I don’t even know the difference in calls of an American Robin from an Eastern Bluebird, though I can tell you their species, genus, family, and order, as well as those of 149 other common North American birds. Still, when I read that over three hundred bird species reside in the Mindo area, I knew it was an opportunity that nobody should pass up, and this was confirmed by one of my ornithology classmates who knew beforehand over half the bird families we learned. Then I read that the Club-winged Manakin, a bird I’d learned about in class, was fairly easily seen performing its lek courtship display, I knew it was an opportunity I could not pass up.
A lek, although the basic monetary unit of Albania, in this case is the Swedish-based term for a small area where males of a species communally display for females in the hopes of attracting one or more as a mate (the Manakin family, Pipridae, is polygynous, i.e. males have several female mates). Continue reading
The Periyar Tiger Reserve is one of those places that gets your adrenaline flowing just a little more than usual, because you’re always on the verge or the high of an interesting sighting or sensation. A good reserve does that. It fosters enough of a preserved environment that exploring it brings you back to a pre-industrial state of awareness.
Today I visited the Newport Bay Conservancy in Newport Beach, California. It’s not quite as wildly invigorating as Wild Periyar, but it was a beautiful day and the birds were hungry.
Click the image above to go to an article, not for the faint of heart, about why encounters with real, wild nature are more valuable than those most of us have, which are increasingly sanitized, gentle and unreal:
…Ecologically speaking, this sanctified nature is not nearly enough. “We live more and more in an enchanted illusion of what nature is, which I think is counterproductive to conservation,” says the Cornell University biologist Harry Greene. It’s the back half of that statement—counterproductive to conservation—that contains surprises… Continue reading
Two days ago I camped with friends in the Periyar Tiger Reserve. We had wonderful sightings: a herd of elephants with a baby, a single bison grazing in the forest, and a bear (a very lucky sighting but from a long distance). It was nice to spot animals at a very close distance and to catch them on camera. I visit the reserve frequently as an official forest watcher, but it is a different experience for me every time.- Mr. Salim
Mr. & Mrs. Sutton staying at Cardamom County visited Periyar this morning and wanted to share their wonderful sightings with us.
While staying at Cardamom County we visited the Periyar Tiger Reserve and enjoyed a lot there. The first thing which attracted us was the Periyar’s naturally blessed landscape. Our kids were very excited and happy to spot elephants, wild dogs chasing sambar deer, bisons, wild boars with their piglets and some the birds too. We were so lucky to spot the elephants with the little one after a short period. This was a unique experience for us and our kids and we hope for the same in future. – Sutton Family
A group from Flamingo Tours staying at Cardamom County has shared their experience of Periyar Tiger Reserve with us. Ms. Nirali Shah along with her group of 20 people visited Periyar and shared her photos and comments. Continue reading
Organikos 